Driven to Distraction

I was born and brought up in Boston and learned to drive there. To me, Boston-style driving is normal, despite what my wife says. It's aggressive, sure, but it's really very predictable. I've also lived in the California Bay Area and here in Seattle, so I've experienced many different ways of driving. California didn't really feel right to me -- it seemed to have a lot of people who understood how to drive, but it lacked the aggressive passion of driving in Boston. Seattle is wonderful to drive in -- you signal to change lanes on the highway and people actually make room for you.

So Florida last week was horrible. It follows no pattern of driving that I can discern except that nobody seems to know where they're going, people won't let you in, they turn left from the right lane and right from the left lane, they drive down the middle of the road, they speed up and slow down randomly...

I’ve done pretty much the same (with the same experiences) but you can add London to that as well (I’m a native Brit, living in Florida). By *far* Florida is the worst place I’ve had to drive. It’s full of old people that think the road belongs to them, and have no idea of what’s happening around them (some can barely see over the steering wheel!). Also, the majority of the cars (in my area at least) are either them big Cadillac "boats", or redneck pickup trucks (with the monster truck tires and jacked-up suspension). If they worked on a ranch it’s probably ok, but the worst terrain they probably encounter is the Wal*Mart parking lot. It makes no sense to me.

I was visiting my sister in Jacksonville FL and right after leaving the airport the first thing I noticed (besides the multitude of ugly license plates) was the inability to discern which lane a driver would change into because they don’t use turn signals! Recently I spotted a driver in Seattle with Florida plates and lo and behold no signal was employed in swerving into my lane.